


Preparing Every Part For You

by reyleaux (witchoil)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - The Little Mermaid Fusion, Angst with a Happy Ending, Cultural Differences, F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Force Bond (Star Wars), Little Mermaid Elements, Magic, Prince!Kylo, Role Reversal, Seven Swans (Album), Worldbuilding, background anidala, mentions of cannibalism, mermaid!rey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-17 04:43:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13651683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/witchoil/pseuds/reyleaux
Summary: By all accounts, a story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end.But where does the sea begin?How do you find the middle of water?And when does a current come to an end?





	1. The Sign In the Sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starlightreader](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlightreader/gifts).



> As with everything, this began as one thing and spiralled madly out of control. 
> 
> The original prompt was for a Disney-like The Little Mermaid AU, but we’ve landed more in Hans Christian Andersen territory. My beta has joked that there are three paragraphs of fluff scattered throughout the fic and the challenge is to find them. And frankly…she’s not wrong. That said, I think they’re a _really good_ three paragraphs of fluff and hopefully are worth the wait. 
> 
> Before you start reading: _**There is a non-optional playlist for this fic**_ **.** It is the sparkling, transcendent album _Seven Swans _by Sufjan Stevens which inspired the chapter titles and overall mood of the fic. Please play it in the background while you read. You will not regret listening to it if you never have before. I promise.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I saw a sign in the sky_   
>  _Seven swans, seven swans, seven swans_   
>  _I heard a voice in my mind_   
>  _I will try, I will try, I will try_
> 
> \- Sufjan Stevens, "Seven Swans"

It started like this, in a small seaside lagoon on the eastern coast of a curving, southern peninsula: One of the Water Folk caught a prince who intended to steal from the sea and was caught trying to steal him in turn.

\--

A tall, broad shaft of light sliced through the water near the cave where Rey crouched, waiting, at exactly midday. A white body in the cool darkness of the pool, headed straight for the bottom where a jagged reef of kyber crystals glowed dimly and twinkled in the sunlight that reached them. 

She felt him before she saw him, the way he pushed the water out of the way. Invisible, underwater waves rolling off of his shoulders.

And what shoulders they were, Rey observed as he dove. Thick and muscled, rippling as he pushed himself ever deeper, air streaming from his mouth. 

He looked, frankly, like a snack. A whole five course meal. He could probably last her a month or more if she timed it right and made sure to cure the parts she wouldn’t be able to eat immediately. 

The thought would have made Rey salivate if she hadn’t already had a mouth full of cold, brackish water.

Rey swam hard behind him, but didn’t approach, keeping her distance and moving around the uneven wall to the place where her trap could be triggered. 

She gripped the chain with a clawed hand as her prey finally reached the bottom of the lagoon, going for the kyber. 

_Always so easy this way_ , she thought to herself, translucent pelvic fins fluttering in pleased anticipation. 

She tugged on the chain and a massive cage came up from the ground in two parts. It was a terrible, wrought-iron thing, likely salvaged by the queen’s royal cronies from a wrecked frigate years and years ago, reassembled specifically for this purpose. The halves met like a clamshell slamming shut around her catch. 

At first he didn’t seem to understand, but a fraction of a second later he twirled in an explosion of bubbles, looking for an exit. He battered himself against the walls of the cage, reaching out and trying in vain to slip between the bars, but Rey knew it was no use. She could have laughed, watching such a massive man try to fit between those bars. No way on this earth. Not under her eye. What Rey caught, Rey _kept_. Good luck to him. 

She waited until the thrashing died down, not even half a minute more. Her kill went limp in his cage and Rey disengaged it, going to him. 

It always astounded her how quickly humans expired. Hard to kill on land, but it always seemed like mere seconds under water would do them in. 

She scooped him into strong arms and took a moment to appreciate her conquest in the green-blue light of the lagoon bottom. He certainly was pale, that hadn’t just been a comparison. And strange-looking, too, for a human. His wide mouth and the harsh angles of his nose and cheeks made her think more of her own kind than most humans that she’d seen. His black hair waved and rippled in the gentle circular current, like a dark halo around his head. He looked like he had expired deep in concentration, with eyes closed and brows pulled tight. 

It was almost a shame, she thought. If things had been different, she may have even found him handsome. But a girl’s gotta eat. 

Rey pulled him tight to her chest. She gave a few hard undulations of her muscular tail, the silver underside throwing flickering reflections about the water. 

Her head broke the surface no more than two and a half minutes since she watched the man dive in. 

Later, she would wish she had enjoyed that part more: the last silent seconds before everything went to hell. 

The man stiffened and thrashed in her arms, gasping for breath as his face hit air. He pushed and kicked at Rey, alternating clawing at her face with pushing her away as hard as he could manage in the water. 

Affronted -- _so much for men being easy to drown_ \-- Rey yelled and clawed back, reaching under her left armpit for the dagger she had strapped to her torso there. They grappled, going under, and Rey slashed out blindly as fresh seafoam and spray obstructed her otherwise perfect underwater vision. The man resurfaced and tried to throw a punch, but hitting the water first, it landed on Rey more like a gentle tap than a blow. She laughed when he tried it a second time, but was cut off as a large hand clamped down on the place where her shoulder met her neck and dragged her forward through the water. 

Rey’s tail shot forward to try and arrest her momentum. Instead of sweeping through the water and sending her safely away, she smacked the silver-white underside of her tail into-- Her assailant? Her prey? Certainly a massive pain in her ass. 

Whichever it was, her heavy tail writhed and slapped against his legs over and over as she tried to thrash away. Unable to properly tread water as she did this, though, he began to sink and _damn his grip_ , he started to pull her with him, too. 

Rey cried out as her head started to go under -- salty water rushing in and turning the cry to a gurgle -- and swam up, _hard._ Rey gathered her strength, shooting forward at him, and slashed again. 

This time he _screamed_. Evidently she had struck something. 

He twisted away from her, howling, and it gave Rey the perfect opportunity to wrap an arm around his throat from behind, laying the knife along his neck. 

“No more trouble,” she ordered harshly in his ear. “You’re coming with me or you’re bleeding out in the middle of his lagoon right now.” 

Rey would never leave such a mess in this particular lagoon, but he didn’t need to know that. 

The man sputtered, feet still kicking alongside Rey’s tail, keeping his head above the surface. His chin caught on the torque secured around her arm: two thin strands of jingle-shells a hands-width apart, bound together by a webbing of shark-gut that she had woven by hand into geometric knot-lace. It was the only piece of jewelry that she owned, and precious. If he did something to destroy it, she would forget her aims of secrecy and probably just kill him here.

He made a wet, choking sound and shook his head feverishly forward and back. 

Rey tightened her grip, acutely aware that she was running out of time. “Which is it?” 

The man jerked his whole body again, causing them to spin clockwise in the water. He grunted. “Fine. Fine, I’ll go.” 

Rey’s grip began to loosen as they came to a stop, looking out over the aqua blue surface of the water that had just been behind them. Her stomach dropped.

“Greetings!” Another of the Water Folk saluted them from no more than ten yards away. She was draped in a thin, ruched shift of muslin and fine strings of pale coral cabochons. Unlike Rey, with her singular torque and its yellow, irregular shells, the woman was adorned with looping, interwoven strings of all kinds of beads, glittering faintly in the midday light. And, of course, over her collarbones, a single, luminescent pendant of kyber. The ultimate symbol of prosperity. Along the sides of her head, two thin sections of a conch shell had been used to gather up her curly black hair and signal her rank: royal constable. One of the queen’s bullsharks, here to keep the rabble out of the lagoon.

Rey cursed under her breath. _She_ was the rabble, after all. 

“My name is Loté, of the queen’s guard, and I hardly need to hear your side of the story to understand what’s going on here, but I’m giving you the opportunity to do so now.”

Frozen, Rey opened her mouth like a puffer in the shallows, mute. Slowly, praying the woman, Loté, didn’t notice, she sheathed her knife. The man struggled. 

Loté raised a brow and inclined her head towards Rey. “Do not lie to me.” 

“He fell,” Rey lied.

“She attempted to drown me!” The man’s voice cut harshly over his consonants, like a whetstone over a blade. It echoed almost comically around the high walls of the lagoon. 

Shouting over him, Rey went for broke. “He fell from the lip of the rock and cut his face on the way down. I’ve just fished him up.”

“I wasn’t aware that your knife was a natural feature of the rock,” the man spat back. 

Loté ignored his comment, still glaring at Rey. “We heard the cage close, scavenger.” 

Again, he interjected. “ _You_ built that?” 

“This is a hunting ground,” Loté said, barely glancing at the man before returning her sharp gaze to Rey. “But it belongs to the royal family _only_.”

“So the stories are true. You’re cannibals.”

“Relax,” Loté said, derision plain in her voice. “You’ll likely escape this unscathed. What’s your name, prey?” 

Rey couldn’t see his face, but she felt him tense as though scowling. 

“Kylo Ren,” he said sharply, venom overtaking his voice. “Infante of the Coast, son of the Rey.”

“And yours, scavenger?”

Rey felt like laughing, if only weakly. _Oh R’iia help me, I tried to poach a prince._

“It’s, uh, it’s Rey. Also. Just ‘Rey,’ though, no ‘the.’ Not the same one.”

“Obviously,” Kylo Ren sneered. Despite herself, Rey scowled and used the hand not around his neck to slap him wetly across the temple. He cursed and twisted, trying vainly to claw at her with his short-nailed fingers. 

Loté shouted at them to stop with the kind of authority that implied she could make them if they didn’t. 

“Is it true?” She asked, voice deep and serious. “Did you cut him? Did you draw his blood?”

The words fell heavy on Rey’s ears and something in her sank like a stone to the bottom of her stomach. 

“I--” Rey stuttered, mind suddenly racing back to a story she knew from childhood. Oh gods no, this was bad. If she had meant what she said about him escaping unscathed--

“Yes!” Kylo Ren shouted. “She did.” 

Loté only laughed, crossing and uncrossing her arms as she considered the two of them, still locked in an awkward, antagonistic embrace. “Well,” she said. 

Kylo echoed her in confusion, finally tearing at Rey’s arm around his shoulders with his own. “Well?”

“Let him go.” 

“No,” Rey said, beginning to panic, “please, I need--”

“Let him _go_ ,” she repeated, tone turning sour through a vicious grin. “By order of the queen’s guard, let him go. If you do, I’ll levy no charges and let you return home. If you don’t, face trial. I’m giving you a generous choice.” 

\--

Freed by Loté’s order, Kylo Ren climbed frantically up the wall of the lagoon, the pain of the rock scraping and slicing the skin of his hands only matched by the sting of seawater beginning to dry in the fresh cut running up his cheek. The water mingled with the blood and ran down his face like faint, pink tears.

Emerging, Kylo stood in rocky, sand-dusted clearing carpeted by vines and edged with a few sturdy-looking bay cedars and two massive magnolia bushes. Less than a half-mile away, he had a boat tied to the rock of this peninsula. Just a skiff, but it had carried him here quickly and with little trouble, perfectly capable of slicing its way over the top of the rough waters of the coastline. He took a single step away, back in the direction of the boat, when he heard a loud splashing from below and suddenly remembered: If that girl Rey had made her way _into_ the lagoon by water, there had to be a way back out.

He thought of her face – the sharp look in her eyes as she had slashed and grasped at him and the even sharper look of her many, many teeth – and shivered. She did not seem the type to give up on her prey, especially not after something as mild as a _warning_. The cryptic offer by the other one of the water folk nagged at him, but Kylo wasted no time contemplating it while still so near to the source of the trouble.

No, trying to return home by sea from a berth so close to this place while she was certainly still hungry _and_ bitter over her loss of him both— That would be suicide. He had no choice but to return on foot.

With a huff, he retrieved the small rucksack he had brought with him from the boat, grateful for his own inclination to be over-prepared. Stalking off between two of the pale, twisting bay cedars towards the sun, he dug around in the bag, hoping that he could make the litre of clean water and small pouch of dried meat and hard biscuits last as long as he needed. Briefly, he imagined himself attempting to construct a fishing spear of some kind, but pushed the thought away. If he moved quickly, it wouldn’t come to that.

He wound his way through the muggy hardwood forest that covered the peninsula until the sun finally disappeared beyond the horizon. From the cliffside where he stopped to check his bearings, he had to admit the view was spectacular. The looming orange disk of the sun seemed to vibrate on the horizon, throwing the distant silhouette of the fort where he resided into a strange relief of fire-red light. From this far it looked like a toy on a far shelf, its bulk and might beyond Kylo’s ability to recall. Something sinister possessed its shape from this distance – something about its imposition onto _that_ far cliffside, something about that fleeting thought of fire – but he couldn’t pin it down. Owing the thought to his general unease at being stranded and now reassured he had his heading, Kylo retreated back into the cover of the trees and made what “camp” he could as night fell. No fire and no shelter, but a little water and a single wool blanket. 

There had been more in his skiff -- scavenged from around the fort for an expedition not authorized by the Rey -- but he would have to make do without. Kylo went out with nothing but hearsay, hoping an unexpected success would restore his father’s faith in him after a series of failures and punishments that seemed to stretch back nearly a year. He could no longer remember what it was that had started it, a snide comment or a refusal of an order, maybe. Or maybe it had been nothing at all, just the due he paid for his good fortune, a cost he did not understand except that he deserved it. 

Even if it took him longer than he expected to return, Kylo could comfort himself with the thought that his father would be pleased to know what he had learned, his insatiable desire for conquest only matched by that for riches. And from what Kylo Ren could tell, the Water Folk would provide the Rey an opportunity to indulge in both. 

Provided he didn’t get eaten first.


	2. The Truth / The Devil's Territory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Be still and know your sign_   
>  _The beast will arrive in time_   
>  _We stayed a long, long time_   
>  _We stayed a long, long time_   
>    
>  _To see you_   
>  _To beat you_   
>  _To see you_   
>  _At last_
> 
> \- Sufjan Stevens, "In The Devil's Territory" 

_It started with a scavenger and a prince and the bloodshed between them. But that is not how it_ began _._

_Centuries before that lagoon, it began like this: With the sun, setting in the evening as blood-red as it had risen. The knife-edge between night and day, a place where living met dying._

_A Water Maid -- only a few summers into her adulthood, brown-haired, and under-adorned for one of her beauty -- observed this with a sense of unease as she hauled the limp body of her catch back to an empty cave where she hoped the queen’s guard would not follow._

_Partially submerged in choppy, cold waters, it was easy to think of him in general terms -- as a dead weight in her arms, as tendrils of loose hair that tangled in her meager jingle-shell jewelry, as a collection of joints and limbs and curving fillets to be taken apart and stored in a series of cool, dry nooks that would keep her and her sisters fed through this last push of winter. She hoped that she could keep thinking of him -- of_ it _\-- that way._

_Setting the air deep into her lungs, she dove through a last, short tunnel. Low light filtered through, refracting on the glass-shard edges of the rock through which the passage wound. Though she knew that it didn’t matter, she still clutched the man tightly to her chest as she swam, keeping him from the cuts and gashes she knew would follow if she let him jostle and scrape against the walls. There were no laws against mutilating prey with consequences worse than those she had already surely incurred through poaching, but she could not shake the urge to pull him close. Save him this last little bit of harm before the end._

_She emerged into the familiar circle of the cenote with a gasp and -- though she had thought him already dead -- the man in her arms echoed it, his mouth opening to gulp in air, though his eyes stayed closed. In her shock, she nearly dropped him._

_Instead brought him quickly to the lip of the rock shelf that wound in an incomplete, uneven crescent around the far wall of the cave._

_He had been light in the water, but out of it was another matter. Though she was strong, it took a few hard and awkward pushes to get him up. The maid rolled him onto his side facing her where she bobbed in the water and he coughed, expelling seawater from his mouth onto the shiny, black rock. It glinted reddish orange in the light which filtered in from the twisted opening in the cenote’s ceiling above them._

_She noticed that his hair was likely auburn when it was dry. A few curls clung to the curving swell of his cheekbone and edge of his square face. He had a faint scar near his right eye, running straight up and down, crossing his brow, and a cleft in his chin. His nose turned minutely up, squared off at the end, oddly charming even in the circumstance. He looked sallow, under-rested, with bags beneath his eyes. Eyes which, the maid noticed, were a bluish green and trained on her._

_“Oh,” she said, feeling something swell in her chest. “Oh no.”_

_He coughed, and she felt the urge to press a palm to his face to soothe him._

_“Are you an angel?”_

R’iia, he sounds so young. _He couldn’t be any older than she was. Maybe even younger._

_“No. My name is Padmé.”_

_“Padmé.”_

_“Yes.”_

_He smiled and Padmé swore she felt her heart tearing in two. She realized with dread that she could not kill him, not even if he had asked her to._

_“My name is Seawalker. Anakin Seawalker.”_

❧

After she lost her prey, Rey thought she would go mad from the frustration alone. Then she simply thought she was going mad.

What began as a daze as she swam through the tunnels leading from the lagoon to the sea turned into a burning itch at the back of her mind, a feeling like a shard of oyster shell lodged between her sharp cartilaginous teeth which she could neither keep from cutting her tongue nor dislodge. 

The memory of Loté smiling, smugly satisfied in the manner only the well-clothed and well-fed could be, hung over Rey’s head like a threat. It _had_ been a threat, actually, in a way. 

But she didn’t have the time to waste being angry, no matter how much she might have earned it. Instead she set to stalking the coastline back towards where she knew the humans lived in their massive stone castle. And, coincidentally, stalked back towards her own home in the process. _Squat_ would have been a more truthful term, but she had turned it into a home with her habitance. 

She told herself to reach out, feeling with every sense she had to find him, and prayed he would be stupid enough to get back on the water right away, thinking himself safe. 

Soon enough Rey came to a small inlet that was more beach than cliff to find a skiff “docked” to a hefty tangle of mangroves. The thick, woody vines were quickly beginning to swallow the boat, but it glowed like a beacon to Rey. She knew instantly that it was his, as doubtless as a gull knew it was flying north in the spring. 

But the relief that surged through her only lasted so long. 

Rey camped out by the boat nearly until nightfall, hungry and frustrated, knowing with each passing second that it was less and less likely that he would be coming back. At last, her anger and impatience got the better of her. Those and her near-certainty that the Infante wouldn’t appear while she investigated. At this point, he was either well on his way back to the castle or had been killed by something else on the peninsula. As soon as she thought it, though, Rey knew the latter couldn’t be just like she’d known this boat was his. Pure instinct, or something like it. 

As repayment for her wasted time, Rey ransacked the boat. What she found surprised her. Or rather, what she _didn’t_ find. 

There were no weapons on board, nor gold, and the only food was a single day’s ration of salt pork and a bag of tough, bitter chestnuts. Rey ate the salt pork with barely a breath between bites but could not force herself through the chestnuts. She thought as she crumbled one between her teeth that it hardly seemed like the food of a prince. There wasn’t even any of the wine on board that she knew humans were so good at making and drinking. 

And no indication of why, exactly, Kylo Ren had come to this place. Though her knowledge of the written languages of humans was limited, Rey knew enough of monarchy to be able to spot a royal missive. Calfskin parchment, scrolling calligraphy, some kind of seal or insignia. She found none of these. Instead, she found an oilcloth sack with a roughly bound book inside. Paper pages, she noted, covered in indecipherable handwriting that was at once swooping and sharply angular. 

A book of days -- _his_ days, she realized. She wondered how many, then admonished herself for the thought. She was supposed to be hunting him, not wondering what he wrote about in his diary. 

Still frustrated but temporarily satiated, Rey lifted herself fully out of the water and onto the boat and allowed herself to sleep.

What sleep she got was not particularly restful. The moment she shut her eyes, Rey saw flashes of red and orange light. A halo. The sun? But something obstructed it, darkened it, and that darkness spread out until it was all she could see. She dreamed she was inside it, surrounded by cool, moist air and echoes upon echoes of an unfamiliar voice. It sent shivers down her long spine which suddenly, for some reason, didn’t feel quite as long…

Rey jolted awake.

She tossed and turned for the better part of an hour in the pre-dawn dark, unable to convince herself back to sleep. But neither did she want to leave yet, afraid that she might greatly outpace the prince. The sky clung to the blue shade of night, but enough light filtered across the horizon from the approaching dawn that she could, for the most part, see things clearly. 

Restless and curious both, she rifled through the clutter she had left in the hull of the boat until she found the journal again. 

She found that the pages riffled pleasantly between her fingers and stopped on a page much neater than the rest. The strokes looked clear and smooth, like they had been done slowly and with great purpose. The lines stacked on top of one another in a strange but discernible pattern, unlike the dense seas of words that covered other pages. 

Tracing the letters with a nail, Rey set about trying to read it. The light rose and shifted as she deciphered the words, thankfully in a language she knew. The verbage was old, outdated by a hundred years or so, but understandable. 

Sun fell on her warm and pleasant by the time she had it all worked out, and the end of her marlin’s tail -- shimmery silver-white on the underside and striped blue and green on the back -- flicked lazily into the water from where she slung it over the side of the boat. 

_Thou Great First Cause, least understood:_  
_Who all my sense confined_  
_To know but this—that thou art good,_  
_And that myself am blind:_

_Yet gave me, in this dark estate,_  
_To see the good from ill;_  
_And binding Nature fast in fate,_  
_Left free the human will._

_What conscience dictates to be done,_  
_Or warns me not to do,_  
_This, teach me more than Hell to shun,_  
_That, more than Heaven pursue._

_What blessings thy free bounty gives,_  
_Let me not cast away;_  
_For God is paid when man receives,_  
_To enjoy is to obey._

She read the words slowly aloud to herself, trying to understand why he had copied them here. She knew that humans were fond of this God to the point of obsession in a way the Water Folk never had been with their Goddess, but she could sense a tension in the words that she couldn’t make sense of. It didn’t feel exactly like devotion, but a desperate hope for it.

Rey turned the journal over in her hands and deposited it gingerly back into its oilcloth bag. Maybe, if she were careful on her journey back to her home… But no, it was a stupid thought, an errant fantasy brought on by her desperation. 

She didn’t keep trophies. 

Rey told herself as she swam that she hadn’t given up hope yet -- that she would catch her prey before he was lost to her forever -- but she couldn’t help the feeling that she would just arrive at home at the end of this, empty-handed and hungry. Just like always. 

\--

Kylo Ren walked for two full days from the lagoon towards the fort before running out of food.

He had chewed the jerky and tack slowly as possible and drank only when he was light-headed. In the morning, he took the time to collect rainwater from the broad, waxy leaves of the magnolias, dripping it with careful patience into his waterskin so as not to lose a drop of it. 

In the afternoon, he was parched and woozy from hunger, but he truly believed he’d felt worse before. Maybe not physically, but he’d felt worse. At least, he thought bitterly, pushing his sweat-soaked hair from his forehead, he was sleeping well for the first time in years. 

Not that he was sleeping _normally_. Not at all. 

On the very first night, he drifted in and out of a dream that he was swimming deep beneath the surface of the ocean. He could feel that it was cold, but he didn’t _feel_ cold, just ordinary. He tossed and turned, images washing over him and receding. There, he reached out to spear at a bony, underfed snapper. There, he surfaced for just a second and dove back down, the ever-increasing pressure of the water above him more reassuring than uncomfortable. 

But that first night had been mild in comparison to the next two. With each one, he felt more strongly that the dreams were real as they became longer and clearer. 

It was as though his brush with the Water Folk had infected him with their strangeness.

Where he used to fall asleep into a deep, textureless blackness, he now dreamed of brilliant three-colored beads, glowing blue and red and green in wide striations. He pinched them between thin fingers and painstakingly drilled them by hand with something that looked like it might once have been the hammer of a rifle, now filed down to a sharp bit. It seemed to last for hours, the constant, focused turning. Maybe a dozen beads, maybe only two. He could not remember dreaming of them being strung. 

Perhaps the strangest thing, though, was how it felt so natural. The loneliness of these dreams perfectly mirrored the loneliness of his own days without the constant summons to his father’s side and the attendant revelations: that he was a magnificent young commander beyond compare, that he was a worthless excuse of a child, that he was both, that he was neither. He knew the ache of that solitude, but also craved the peace of it. He couldn’t decide if it was worth the sleep. 

Two days passed before the truth broke through, but between the heat and the hunger and the inarticulable _relief_ of being so far from home, Kylo Ren felt like he had been waiting for a year. 

The night after that second full day, he had been able to see with perfect clarity the shape of the forearm that reached out before him as he speared yet another tiny fish. That and the shimmer and gentle clicking of the jingle shell bracelets that encircled it: two bands securely wrapped at the midpoint between elbow and wrist, a strange, geometric lace webbed between. 

He was dreaming that he was her, the huntress. Rey. 

The realization reached him even through the haze of sleep and he jerked awake among the fibrous green vines and thin tendrils of mangrove root on which he’d bedded down. He took a deep breath, attempting to calm himself as he remembered that no, he hadn’t become a monster in the night. He was still himself. A bastard prince, maybe, but one with two legs and no hunger for human flesh. 

It was in these intervening moments, though, that Kylo felt something strange. Something like a tingling. A scratching? No, a _burning, God Almighty._

Leaping to his feet, Kylo noticed hundreds upon hundreds of flashes of glimpsing light -- the shining carapaces of insects. They were all around where he had been lying, he realized with horror. _They were coming out of his trouser-legs._ He kicked and swore, throwing his feet out and beating at his legs to get the damn things _off_. 

Hardly even thinking and full of adrenaline, Kylo gathered his things and stomped immediately back into the woods. The moon was high and full, plenty bright to light his way. But by the look of it and the tide, it was still deep night. 

He hadn’t felt tired at the time, of course, but that would change.

Perhaps that was why the following afternoon, addled by the heat and the itching memory of the ants, Kylo Ren found himself by the water again, peering into the partially submerged entrance to a cave. Though some light shone in from a crag in the ceiling, it was shady and cool compared to the outside, the air mediated by all of the water. He could even see a wide, curving shelf of rock along the wall of the cave, thankfully lifted out of the water. A perfect place to lie down without the risk of being attacked by fire ants. 

That anything else might attack him didn’t even register as Kylo dropped himself from the ledge into the water at the opening, swimming with hard, confident strokes towards his goal. 

He failed to notice, as he pulled himself onto the ledge and laid his wet pack beneath his head, the reed tanning rack folded against the far wall. Nor did he see the piles of shells and scavenged beads -- mother-of-pearl, tri-colored ammolite, and pale pink coral, among others -- nestled into natural pockets in the rock. 

The sun crossed its zenith overhead as he laid back and, at last, breathed a sigh of relief. The water of the cave seemed to still as he shut his eyes, all thoughts of home replaced with those of sleep as his body pulled his mind into unconsciousness. 

He even forgot his anger at the girl and his fear of not making it home. These he found replaced by a calm curiosity.

In all truth, she was a worthy opponent -- a match for him -- but also something else besides. Thinking of it all, he couldn’t deny her tenacity. How she insisted on her own survival. And on making it something beautiful, too. 

_What is she doing now?_ He wondered, drifting off. _Has she strung those beads yet?_

This time, he found sleep to be sudden and dreamless. A pleasant void, smooth and uninterrupted as--

Kylo woke a fraction of a second shy of slipping into the water. 

Claws dragged shallow scratches across his hip and stomach as an arm rolled him with all its might towards the edge of the ledge, now considerably closer to the waterline than it had been upon Kylo’s arrival. 

Purely out of instinct, Kylo grasped the arm back and threw his body weight in the opposite direction. The thing grabbing at him hissed as he dragged it up against the rock and partially onto the ledge with him. The light was lower now, but he didn’t need it to see that which he felt beneath his fingers -- that same strange torque from the dream and the lagoon. The gut-and-jingle-shell bracelet, fastened around Rey’s forearm. 

They grappled awkwardly, Rey trying to yank Kylo more fully into her reach as she pulled herself bodily onto the ledge and Kylo torn between the urge to back away and leap over her. 

Again, he saw her reach for the blade strapped to her chest. Kylo jerked away and drew back frantically, but found his back met rock as she swung with her full reach and he thought, _God, if this is how it ends, I have no desire to make amends with you or your worthless saints--_

But no blow landed. 

“No!” Rey cried out. She brought the rough-edged obsidian dagger down again and again, the beads around her arm clicking against one another in a soft rhythm. And each time, the dagger glanced away from Kylo’s skin like it simply couldn’t or wouldn’t pierce him. Like she was changing her mind at the last second and drawing it away. 

It felt to him like the barest glance of a breeze. 

“No, _X’us’R’iia_! Fuck!” 

He watched her face scrunch and redden as she kept trying in vain to slice into him. Her nose and eyes crinkled as she did and he could tell-- yes, he knew that face from his own reflection in the warped glass of his windows. She was about to start crying.

This was not the face of a capable hunter having lost her prey. This was—something else. 

“Why?” He said, curiously quiet, voice still caught in that dreamlike place from which she had wrenched him. 

Rey dropped the dagger and did not put her face in her hands. She didn’t try to hide it at all, but met his eyes as she started to cry in frustration, looking at him with such intensity that he wondered for a moment if this were somehow his fault. 

“It’s the Seawalker Pact.” 

“Seawalker.” Kylo said. He knew that name.

Rey blinked shining, dark eyes. Now, looking into them calmly and without interruption, Kylo realized why they had seemed so strange the first time he saw them. She had elliptical pupils, slightly taller than they were wide, surrounded by an expansive iris of red-brown-gold that shone metallic beneath the magnifying dew-drops of the lenses. They were strange and alien and startlingly beautiful.

“You know that story?”

“Of course I know that story, it’s--” He cut himself off, mouth slashing into a frown. “Of course I know it. It’s a horror story.”

“What?” Rey said. “No. It’s--” She choked on the word and tossed her head back, eyes turning to the ceiling as she blinked away tears. A bitter laugh chased out of her mouth. “It’s a love story.” 

“Hardly,” Kylo bit back. 

“Oh, really? Then tell it to me.” There was a tense challenge in her voice, a seeping irritation that invited him to try. And to fail. 

“There was a sailor, from the village where I was raised.”

“And his name was Seawalker, yes, I know.”

He said nothing, but his face changed, jaw flexing subtly. The thin skin beneath his left eye twitched. His mouth trembled. 

“I’m happy to stop any time.” 

They held each other’s eyes silently, some unspeakable agreement passing between them as Rey let him continue.

Kylo took a breath and went on. “He was in a shipwreck. Every man in the crew perished, sucked under by the freezing sea. Every man but him. He woke on the shore, in the arms of one of the Water Folk.” 

He paused, touching a finger gingerly, absently to where the cut she had given him was beginning to scab over and heal. 

“She was looking down at him, probably about to take the first bite, when he opened his eyes. Upon seeing her, the woman who had saved him, with the sun rising behind her face, he fell instantly and deeply in love. He proposed marriage to her right there on the beach, before he was even strong enough to walk. They said if a man pledged a piece of his soul to one of the Water Folk, then it could walk on land. So he did, and for the day of their wedding, she could.”

Rey looked doubtful of him, but Kylo went on before she could interrupt, words coming out rushed and low.

“Then, that night, in their marriage bed, she killed him. She returned to the sea with her husband in her arms in a shift red with his blood. She had never loved him, but ate him, soul and all.”

Kylo folded and unfolded his hands, then folded his arms. His mother had told him the story as a boy, a cautionary tale. Precious little it had helped her. 

“What does that have to do with this?” He asked. 

Rey burst into laughter, bitter tears still in her eyes. 

“ _That_ has nothing to do with this,” she said. 

Kylo scooted back, trying to pull himself up. No wonder she spent her days alone. She was as friendly as starved dog. 

But as he drew his feet back, knees sticking awkwardly up into the air, she reached out and pinched the hem of a trouser leg between her fingers with the same determined pressure he remembered from the bead-drilling dreams. There was a care to it, but also a desperation; he thought of how she had so few and it took so _long--_

 _Don’t disappear,_ the action said, _don’t fall into the sea._

“First of all,” she said, face still sharp but voice suddenly softer, less sure, “that is not at all how the story went.” That same unspeakable thing hung in the air like the lace between Rey’s bracelets. That something so delicate could exist between them, two creatures of such violence and uncertainty, astounded him. Kylo Ren fit it between the fingers of his mind and pinched.

“Oh, really?” He slumped back, letting his knees fall open. 

“Really.” 

“Then _you_ tell it.”

“Someone has to,” she said, shakily tossing half of her tangled hair back over her shoulder. She secured it with what looked like a sectioned piece of shell and a finger bone, plucked from a muslin pouch that hung around her hips, just below where golden skin melted into smooth, metallic tail.

“Yes, okay, his name _was_ Seawalker. And she _did_ save him from a shipwreck.” 

“Glad to see I got something right.”

Rey went on, ignoring his interjection. “But she _did_ love him. She did _catch_ him intending to eat him, but when he woke and they met eyes for the first time, they _both_ fell in love. He did propose on that beach, and like a fool, she accepted. But you can’t eat love for dinner, and neither could her family.”

Kylo’s arms loosened from where they were crossed. Just a little. Rey’s gaze darted away, a strange tic after her earlier resolute glares. She blinked again, rapidly, and went on.

“She was like me. Poor. They were scavengers. And it was a lean year. The ocean isn’t like the surface. If I eat a beast or a beast eats me, it’s all the same. That’s-- That’s why we hunt you. Sometimes. Because sometimes we hunt each other, too. And that year was a bad one. The fact that she managed to catch him in the storm was a miracle. And a crime. The queen’s sorcerers had stirred up the storm for harvest, but she wasn’t supposed to collect from it. If the court found out, it would have been considered poaching. She would have died for it. 

“But she got worse, she fell in love.” 

Kylo Ren was entirely still, barely even breathing. She was crying now, tears beginning to spill from her eyes, but she didn’t stop telling, like the story was a confession she had to make. Like she was as afraid to tell it as she was afraid not to. Kylo was struck suddenly by an urge he had not felt since childhood -- to reach out. To comfort her, this woman who had intended to kill him. 

“They were married that day. And he did, he gave up part of his soul. And she gave up part of hers. That’s how marriage works for us.” She stumbled over the words, stuttering over the end of the next sentence. “Our word for it is the same one as our word for harvest-- for cannibalism.

“So she walked on land that day. And they shared their marriage bed for three nights after. But she could hear the waves at night from his hut and couldn’t stop thinking about sisters, crying out in hunger. They would starve without her, and she would be heartbroken without him. But he had nothing to offer. He was poor, too, just barely out of indentured servitude, and had no right to fish for himself in waters claimed by the Rey. So he gave her the greatest gift he could: he consented to be harvest.

“So yes, she ate him. Soul and all. And because of that her family lived.” 

Rey sniffed. Kylo traced the trails of the tears on her face. One ran down near her nose, over her lip. Another turned away on her cheek, running through a dimple that revealed itself with her grimace. Her lips, full and pink and slightly chapped, worked over the sharp teeth Kylo knew laid beneath. He wondered what they tasted like, if they were saltier than seawater or if maybe, unlike his, they were freshwater. Like rain. 

“It’s been three days since I cut you -- claimed you has prey -- and I failed to take you. It invoked the pact. Now I can’t. Not without your consent.” 

It was Rey’s turn to cross her arms, hugging herself. 

Kylo breathed in and out shallowly as the noontime light shifted. A little more golden, a little to the left, it filtered into the cave from the cracks above and fell on half of her face in a spiralling, starlike whorl. 

“Does that mean--” His tongue felt heavy in his mouth, unable to keep up with his thoughts or the hammering of his heart. “Are we--?”

“I don’t know,” Rey said, hugging herself tighter. “I don’t know, this isn’t supposed to be for me. People like me, we don’t--” She shook her head vigorously and her shoulders shook, too, a sob working itself out of her. “I don’t know.”

A brief and insane thought crossed Kylo’s mind. Two souls, split between two people. Like a meal. Like a bed. 

Perhaps even a throne.

The reverie evaporated as quickly as seawater from black stone, leaving behind only the thinnest dust of salt, imperceptible without tasting. 

He stood up and looked down at Rey with something he knew was a naked softness. He wanted to hide it, but found he couldn’t when she still had tears on her face. 

“I-- I should go,” he said. 

She laughed again, harshly, but it wasn’t directed at him. “I suppose you should.” 

Rey turned herself deftly on the shelf of rock and sank her tail back into the aqua water of the cenote, facing away. Vulnerable. 

Again, he turned his back on her and left. This time much slower, and through water, just like he’d first come. But he left all the same. 

\--

In her own dreams that night, the world coalesced as it never had before. Beyond just the images of a forest and the strange sensation of _walking_ , she felt the ache of Kylo’s body as he at last approached the fort, and another strange ache besides. 

Something pulled down at her as she walked the cool, dark halls of the stone fortress, like an anchor dragging towards the darkness of the deep. 

She saw an old, wrinkled man on a throne, looming over her where she knelt in Kylo’s place. He rose, stooping in his heavy golden robes, and descended the dais with slow, menacing steps. A pale hand with gnarled, claw-tipped fingers grasped at her chin and tilted her face towards his. She could feel the still-healing cut twinge and sear as the fingers pulled hard enough to break the scab. 

“What has happened to my beloved son, hmm?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poetry is an excerpt of Alexander Pope's ["The Universal Prayer"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50590/the-universal-prayer) \- it is itself a devout poem by a very devout man, but Kylo probably chose those verses about blindness and obeisance for a reason. Nerd.


	3. The Child / The Transfiguration

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _If I am alive this time next year_   
>  _will I have arrived in time to share?_   
>  _And mine is about as good this far_   
>  _And I'm still applied to what you are_   
>    
>  _And I am joining all my thoughts to you_   
>  _And I'm preparing every part for you_   
>    
>  _And I heard from the trees a great parade_   
>  _And I heard from the hills a band was made_   
>  _And will I be invited to the sound?_   
>  _And will I be a part of what you've made?_   
>    
>  _And I am throwing all my thoughts away_   
>  _And I'm destroying every bet I've made_   
>  _And I am joining all my thoughts to you_   
>  _And I'm preparing every part for you_
> 
> \- Sufjan Stevens, "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands"

_In time, Padmé discovered that there was a grief above even that annihilatory blackness which had consumed her on the night of her husband’s death._

_On the birthing bed, she tried not to think of it as much as she could, but the task was too much. Too much blood, too much pain, too many hands grasping at her with a pressure at once reassuring and restricting._

_Her sisters gathered around her and held her on the bed of kelp and moss that they had constructed in the back of their shared cenote. Hour by hour, she watched the light change over her head through the crag above, a bright star becoming dark. Then bright once more._

_Two full days her labor lasted, so long that she thought she might die. So much longer than her mother had struggled with her – perhaps longer than she had taken to birth Padmé and all of her sisters combined._

_It was startling, unheard-of among their people._ A human birthing, _Padmé heard Sabé whisper to Dormé, like a human woman pushing a human baby from her narrow, underdeveloped hips._

 _The sun set again. Bright star back to darkness, Padmé thought, then wondered when she had begun looking to the sun for time instead of the sea. How had she forgotten the tides so easily? As though that was all it took, being propped up on her back, for her to forget where she had come from – where she_ still _belonged._

_With a last weak and silent push – all screaming pushed from her body like wind already, all tears already spent – something slipped from her into the waiting arms of her sisters._

_She held her breath until the baby breathed, a thin cry rising from its lips._

_Then another cry from the mouths of her sisters, all at once, all frightened._

_It_ had _been a human birth._

_Dormé lifted the child to Padmé, whose arms hung limp at her sides. Cradling the babe in one arm, her sister pulled a hand softly down Padmé’s arm, preparing it to receive the child._

_“Here,” she said, voice both hopeful and mournful at once._

_Looking at the child – so alive but so alien, with its ruddy red skin and the chubby legs emerging from its torso where a tail should have been – Padmé could do nothing but stare. She found, in the end, that she still had tears to shed, cold and salty as the sea._

_All of them knew with that first glance and first cry, the child could not stay. They could teach it to swim, but not to hold its breath for the hours that their bodies could. They could feed it and clothe it in the same overwashed muslin they wore, could place around its neck the same strings of coral beads with which they had played as children, but they couldn’t undo its strangeness. They could love it, but they could not make it belong._

_So Padmé returned in the cool dark before the dawn of the child’s third day to the home she had shared with her husband. She swam high, fearful of letting the child’s face get too near the water, though she knew from having carried it from the cenote that it could hold its breath. To her shame, she had wondered in those moments if the short swim out of the tunnel might be enough to kill it._

_But like its father, the child survived. Against odds, and perhaps against Padmé’s better judgment._

_But no, she thought, as she placed the child down on the rock that stretched from the hut out to the sea. No, she thought as she undressed it, fearful that the wet cloth would sap it of all warmth before someone heard the cries. She wanted it to live. She wanted something of that union – the short mornings in that house, the laughter and kisses that had passed between them during the three days that she had looked and lived and loved like him – to live on. It was merely her grief to bear that she should not be able to nurse that life like a mother was meant to._

_So it was with this deep but bitter-edged love that Padmé retreated and watched from just beyond the shore as her husband’s mother heard the cries of the naked, shivering child and came running to gather it in her arms._

❧

So much had changed in so little time. Just a week ago, Kylo Ren had a title, a home, and a king. He had returned from his ill-fated expedition different, but not yet dispossessed.

Now, though--

Now he stumbled through patches of rough rock and crushed-shell sand deliriously. Now blood was drying to a tacky glue on his arms he had the distinct feeling that he was evaporating with each step.

Each time he blinked, he could see her in his mind’s eye. Her slicing through dark water towards her home as he left the fort; her bringing a small fish up to her sharp-toothed mouth by the time he was close to her cave.

Lit only by starlight and a half-moon, he moved over the shelf of igneous rock that housed her cenote carefully, searching for that familiar fractal crack he knew gave a view down inside. With a shuffling footfall, he heard a rock go skittering over the shelf, then— A fading sound as it dropped through a narrow channel and fell into water below. He nearly choked in relief.

A voice wound its way up from that same fissure.

“Kylo?”

“Rey,” he called back, voice soft and weak.

Kylo went to his knees on the shelf, crawling towards the crack to peer into the cave. There was Rey, bobbing in the center, looking up.

\--

And from below, she saw his shadow, the half-moon hovering above his head like a crown.

His image shifted, dipping in a way Rey struggled to make sense of from her vantage until she heard his grunt of effort.

“Don’t!”

She called out just as a cracking sound echoed around her, chased by a soft gasp as he and a large chunk of rock fell almost ten yards from the ceiling to the water below. His splash soaked her face and hair, painting her with pinpricks of the bioluminescent algae that cast a blue-green glow about the cenote. It stuck to his hair, too, as he resurfaced, a rivulet running down through his scar. The mark she’d left on him, drawn in light.

“You’re insane,” she chided as he sucked in air.

“I must be,” he said breathlessly.

Rey searched his face, finding signs of sleeplessness and pain. Abrasions chased the swell of his right cheek and dark bruises hung beneath his eyes, far worse than the ones she remembered from the last time they spoke. His lips looked horrifically chapped, split and weeping in more than one place.

“What happened?”

Wonder stole across Kylo’s features as he met Rey’s eyes, something soft and heavy weighing down his voice. “I killed him.”

“You—”

“I killed the Rey. In his bed while he slept.”

He blinked reddening eyes and let out a shaky breath.

“I’ll show you,” he said, turning to swim towards the rock shelf. He hoisted himself gingerly onto it where it was, nearly a foot under water at this tide. He held out a shaking hand to Rey, beckoning her to join.

Rey reached back without hesitation and instantly, as skin met skin, her head was filled with sound and visions.

A collapsing face stared down at her, features twisted up either in rage or delight – she could not tell. She recognized him from the dreams from before. Kylo’s father, the Rey of the Coast. Snoke.

“So they truly still exist?”

“Yes, Father, I saw her. I felt her blade.” Rey – Kylo, actually, because it was his memory – responded.

“And their royal court remains intact, even after all of this time…” He trailed off, seeming to consider the implications. “You said she wore jewelry? Even as the poorest among them?”

Something in Kylo’s body strained away from Snoke’s questing glare. His response came out thin, withheld. “Yes, some.”

“Some,” Snoke said, considering, hissing over the word. “This could change everything, my son.”

The vision shifted, the air going cold and tense, echoing closely. They were in some sort of artificial cave. _Cellar_ , the word came to her, then also shifted. _Cell_.

Snoke brought his face close to Kylo’s, washing him in damp, stale air as he yelled.

“Tell me! It is for the good of your kingdom!”

A dull pain radiated out from Kylo’s wrists and ankles and, as he cast his gaze downwards momentarily, Rey realized why. Shackles of iron entrapped him, chafing and bruising the skin beneath them.

“I don’t remember. I told you I don’t remember. I was injured and lost—I swear.” He said it like a prayer.

Snoke bellowed. “Liar!”

“No,” Kylo said, “no, I swear.”

“Yes, _Seawalker_ ,” Snoke spit the name in contempt, “ _you swear_. Precious little that means to me. A child of liars.”

He balled his hands into fists, shaking his head. “No.”

Rey could feel Kylo remembering them, the liars Snoke invoked, and what he remembered was nothing like this. Instead, he saw his mother’s smile as she looked out over where the village had gathered to hear her speak; he saw his uncle’s patience as he taught his young nephew how to bring in the nets full of fish; he saw his _true_ father’s barking laugh as he helped his young son cheat his way to a winning hand at cards.

Snoke wrapped a gnarled hand around Kylo’s neck, pushing him back into the wall. “I took you in, boy! I gave you a _kingdom!_ ”

Except he hadn’t, had he? Kylo Ren was the claimless Infante. A prince without a promised throne, as Snoke had made abundantly clear years before. _Ward, yes_ , _but heir?_ And he had laughed. He had laughed so hard he’d coughed. _No. Never heir. You think you’re worthy of this throne? You’re hardly worthy of those clothes._

But there was no laughter in his eyes then, cruel or otherwise.

“I _saved_ you!”

Kylo thought of the village that had been burned in exchange for that “salvation”. He thought of the Water Folk who would come next.

Kylo’s features collected themselves, face going hard and cold as he suddenly remembered his mother doing when she had to muster her courage. His fear did not evaporate, but hid itself somewhere deep inside him. He resolved to be brave.

“Yes,” he lied, a tear nearly escaping his eye a the effort, “you did.”

Instantly, Snoke’s face softened, his grip loosening. Those same long-nailed and liver-spotted hands that had choked him seconds before flitted to release him from his bonds, came up to cup his cheeks.

“There he is,” Snoke said with a grin that turned Rey's gut, a mockery of affection. “There’s my _son._ ”

Rey opened her eyes, awake again to the world and the look on Kylo Ren’s face.

She could see those days spent down in the cell written on him -- all those disparate pieces coming together in one story of loneliness and broken trust. She knew now why he had reacted so strangely to the story of Seawalker, could see the wound of that family written on him as surely as the one on his face.

Some “father” Snoke had been. Some “prince” that made Kylo Ren.

A thought struck her like lightning, and a sudden burning need to know. She opened her mouth to ask--

“I have nowhere to go,” Kylo said before she could say the words. Again, there was that twitch of the eye, that withheld pain she had once mistaken for haughtiness.

“What’s your name?”

His brows pulled in, eyes narrowing from the outside as his mouth pulled itself into a trembling grimace. Spit shone on his puffy lower lip as he tried to bite the expression back.

“Please,” she said, “I want to know. If you’re going to ask me to do what I think you are, I want to know.”

He was flushed from shame and being on the edge of tears and Rey remembered thinking once that he had looked more like one of her people than his own. How wrong she had been. He was utterly, agonizingly human.

“I haven’t said it in so long.”

“Say it now, then.”

Years seemed to melt off of him as his face moved through a torturous series of emotions. Even his body seemed younger, smaller, as he pulled his shoulders in.

“Ben,” he said in a shaking whisper. “My mother named me Ben.”

“Ben,” Rey repeated, fitting the word neatly into her mouth -- her throat, her heart. She closed her eyes as he began to speak again, afraid to watch his face as he said it.

“Take me as harvest.”

And even though she had known what he would say, the words still hit her like a musket ball. Iron and hot pain and disbelief. 

She had seen the pain in him -- the sucking, insatiable thing that had burrowed within him, the same one that had chained him in a cell -- and she would have expected that it was that pain speaking through him now. An escape. She could understand that.

But what she saw -- heard in her mind, felt in her limbs, tasted all across her palate -- was not that.

“Are you sure?” She asked. “There’s another way-- we could live on the shore--”

“No,” he said, voice catching low within his chest, stopped up. He shook his head. “They’ll know. I have nowhere to go. I have no way to get there.”

Rey’s tail coiled and uncoiled around her where she sat. Her heart beat so loudly in her ears that she couldn’t hear the lapping of the water at the walls anymore. Was this what it felt like to be in the midst of a myth? Was this what it felt like to be in a love story? It was happening too fast. After those first days of wanting it to be over, now Rey was desperate to slow this down, desperate for another day to figure it out.

His voice crashed against her like a wave, interrupting her thoughts.

“Please, let me go with you instead. Take me. I consent.”

He spoke the words like he was begging her to accept a gift. And he was. Damn him, he was.

Rey felt hollowed by it, each part of her sucked away as if by the tide. Powerless to the pull of the ocean, the vast god which now soothed her with a new promise of survival just as it laughed at her.

Again -- now, always, unendingly -- tears welled in her eyes and ran in tracks down her face.

“Okay,” she said, mouth and words gummy with a grief she was beginning to understand had become her inheritance. “Okay.”

She reached out with shaking hands, touching him more gently than she had touched anything in her life, and pulled him towards her, into her, and into the water.

They slipped in without a single splash and hung, treading water. Ben’s face was almost dry again — except where his eyes shone like jewels wet with fresh water.

“Are you sure?” Her voice sounded weak in her ears, its softness echoed gently back to her as it bounced off the walls of the cave. She had never noticed that before, not in all the years she'd lived here alone. She thought back to the story about Seawalker, to the Water Maid and her family, how she could imagine that they were here with her, in the echoes.

 _But how stupid_ , she thought a second later. They wouldn’t have lived here, in this cave. She was alone, had always been, until this tether with him. Ben. And she would be alone again, soon enough.

He tipped his head forward, his hands coming to skim her ribcage under the water.

“I always used to hate the ocean,” he said, searching her face with his whole being. She felt like he was cradling it with his hands. “You make me--” he stuttered over the words. “You make me realize-- I’m sorry--”

This time, he didn’t stutter, but he didn’t finish, either, Rey interrupting him with the soft pads of her fingers, pressing salt into his lips. She brought her eyes up to his and held them, his searching ceased. _That’s right, I’m right here_. His brows relaxed, then tightened again as his eyes slipped closed. Rey’s stomach tied itself in knots in response. She felt his lips move beneath her fingers, pressing out a little, like he was--

 _Oh_. He kissed them. Tenderly, almost imperceptibly. And Rey realized she wanted that. More of that.

She moved her hand down, along his jaw and neck, to rest on his shoulder. They came together slowly and softly, like the tide into a long and sloping inlet, both trembling all the way in, hearts hammering so hard they could have made waves. Their lips met, already wet, slipping slightly before they found purchase.

And for all of the gentleness they pressed into it, the kiss was still salty, still bitter, still sharp. The serrated edge of a tooth dragged slowly across Ben’s lip and they tasted the blood together, in one another’s mouths. His consent was honest, then. The pact had been broken.

No, it had been fulfilled.

They parted, Rey’s spit glistening with Ben’s blood on his bottom lip, and he nodded, eyes sharp and narrow in a kind of determined sadness. “Now,” he said, high and thin. “Please.”

Rey nodded back and gripped him by the shoulders, taking a deep breath in as he let one out. She flexed the muscles of her tail and the complex chambers in her abdomen, letting them sink. And there was that same look of concentration on his face, that same blue paleness from the first time she had seen him. She knew their time was limited, but a half a minute didn’t seem long enough -- seemed even shorter than when he had trapped him in the cage and waited impatiently for him to die.

 _A minute more_ , she thought, tears already dissolved into the water of the cenote, invisible, inconsequential. _Two minutes more._

She brought her mouth to Ben’s and breathed out, willing the life of it into him.

Ben breathed it in.

They hung like that, dark hair floating and tangling around their faces in the green-blue light. Their mouths fit together perfectly in a way Rey recognized but couldn’t grasp. Like water-tossed stones, prepared by a lifetime of waves to interlock their curves in a tidepool in the wash of the sea.

Then Ben went rigid in her arms.

Rey pulled back to see his face pinching in pain, his mouth opening and so much of that precious air flowing out from his lips. She panicked, gripped him tighter, thinking _no, no, no, still too soon, I thought I had given us more-- more time, please, R’iia, no--_

He placed a steadying hand on her chest, right over her rightmost heart, not pushing her away but stilling her, saying, _wait_.

He shifted and twisted, that steadying hand grasping at the worn fabric of her shirt and the decoratively knotted strings that criss-crossed it. A shimmering flash moved across his neck and collarbones and his fingernails dug into her, hard and _sharp_ in a way they hadn’t been a moment ago. Stunned, Rey looked down to see his trousers torn, floating away, and-- _Oh, Mother R’iia, you heard me, you_ heard _me._

A thick, smooth tail of banded black and grey flicked below his body. Offset, round-edged pelvic and dorsal fins twitched out of rhythm. And there, at the end: an asymmetrical, forked caudal fin, as sharp and uneven and beautiful as his face.

A face from which two new eyes stared, meeting hers, whiteless and metallic and unflinching and _joyful_.

She released him to place her hands on his chest and, there, yes, she could feel the chasing, perfect rhythm of them, the three hearts taken up residence in his chest.

It hadn’t been by half-measures, he was really just like her.

With that name, though, _Seawalker_ , he always had been, hadn’t he?

The thought made her want to laugh. How stupid they had been not to even think that the pact could go both ways. How stupid they had been to try to be anything other than this.

Rey pulled at his arms, guiding him back to the surface where they gasped and laughed and sobbed together like Rey hadn’t done since she was a child -- nor had he, she suspected.

❧

So the prince became a scavenger and the scavenger made a husband of him on a bright day in the spring, although for all intents and purposes the rite did nothing that the pact had not already.

She, dressed in a red-dyed tunic that showed the tan skin of her collarbone and sternum and a tooled belt of leather, fastened their hands together with a kerchief of beaded knot-lace they had crafted together over the intervening months.

He, grown-out hair embellished with a crown of frill-edged orange orchids, donned the clothes she had worn the day they had met in a ceremonial acceptance of her protection.

Overseen by none but themselves and the setting sun, they chose not to exchange vows, but clasped one another’s hands in silence before coming together in a kiss. This time, after much practice, Rey understood how their mouths fit together: like the sharp and perfect curve of an oyster’s halves within which a single, shining pearl might grow, given the time.

And they had all the time in the world.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much, starlightreader, for the flexibility you offered to me in creating this for you. This was my first exchange fic ever and it was and is so important to me that I did it in a way that honored your request and was engaging for me to write. I hope that this fic brings you joy commensurate with the challenge it brought me. And I really, really, _really_ hope you like it.
> 
>  
> 
> And a _massive_ thanks to my beta, Dea ([knight-of-cookies](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Knight_of_Cookies/pseuds/Knight_of_Cookies)), for your hand-holding and your brainstorming and your willingness to walk with me through this fic every single step of the way. Your enthusiasm kept me going in moments where I doubted my ability to bring this to life. This fic literally could not have happened without you and your quick and decisive instruction that I leave out all of the courtroom drama. Thank you so much.


End file.
